I’m just now getting caught up on the ea_spouse story that’s been making the rounds and wondering, “so what’s new?” The crunch-time-all-the-time atmosphere at EA, while horrid, doesn’t sound all that different than just about any other large software product shop. Seriously, haven’t we been living in this “crisis” for about thirty years now? Or can someone give me the good news that there’s a reliable methodology for developing systems and that the software industry has stopped sucking and that EA is now the exception, not the rule?
I never looked at that story for the reason that it didn't sound like it was talking about anything that wasn't going on in the rest of the software industry. And now I've read it and my reaction is pretty much "Yeah, that's a particularly bad work situation, but I'm not at all surprised." Ah, well. I guess folks thought that the video game industry was above such things.
I think that the twist of "But you should WANT to work harder because video games are a DREAM JOB!" is a big difference between an EA and a Microsoft. Many of the employees do feel privileged to be there, and the companies begin to act as though a person should do anything requested to retain a game job.
Check the FatBabies archive for some nasty examples of how wrong (possibly even more so than in business software) this idea is.